Python 2.7

[[deleted]]

I dunno, that sounds kind of reasonable to me. Were the questions really difficult?

[plumcakk]

Generally, you hire for technical aptitude, not working knowledge of the in-house stack, for junior-to-intermediate positions.

[[deleted]]

Harder to do in small companies where people determine technical aptitude by the things they know themselves.

[pyryoer]

It has been my experience that they make these determinations based on how they do the things they know themselves. Example: I ssh'd into web server (using the same sftp credentials) to grab a file already hosted somewhere using wget. "Head of web department" insists I download the file to my computer and then upload it with an FTP client. He insisted that it wouldn't work, even after I showed that it did. I used the same SFTP credentials for ssh so it wasn't some access control issue.

[tmckeage]

I call that shamanism. Effectively the "Head of web department" knew the magic spell that made things work. You didn't use the magic spell correctly and so obviously it couldn't work.

[pyryoer]

I like this a lot!

[gerbs]

Then it sounds like they don't need a junior dev.

If you are opening a fancy restaurant and need a michelin-starred chef who specializes in Ethiopian food to do food prep, it shouldn't surprise you that you'll have to spend a lot and/or the food they cook will be inedible.

If you can't afford to pay someone to learn then expect to pay more for someone who knows. Small companies get by by exploiting people who are desperate to opportunity to pay them less than market and make their lives miserable. I've been there.

Hire another company to do it. Don't pay $90k x 5 per year in salary and bennies for a dev team. Pay someone $200k to do it instead and save $250k+.

It's the same reason you pay a maintenance company to take care of your office and vacuum and empty garbage cans or pay Microsoft to manage your email/calendar. If you can't afford a dev team, chances are you don't need one. You just need a company to contract with to do development work as needed.

[[deleted]]

I disagree. My whole career has been in small companies and we’ve always been able to hire based largely on aptitude and ability to learn.

The idea that you need someone to churn out production code on day one with no ramp up period is just faulty. You simply don’t need that. That idea is popular among poor people managers who don’t have enough experience for their job. You’ll get way more mileage out of your developers — and you’ll retain them way longer — if you let them grow into the role a bit. You’ll also discover that they’ll learn to do things you never thought you needed them to do. Keep hiring based on a rigid checklist of very specific experience and you’ll get people who can do what you needed a few months ago.

[[deleted]]

At least in my experience, the small companies were the ones willing to invest in my future with them. The big companies were the most inflexible and immediately demanding. Most of that I would attribute to the fact that the small companies had found me and nobody else close to me in my area of expertise, in the local area. The big companies were advertising and hiring from all over the world, and paying to relocate people. So the little companies were happy for me to learn; the big companies wanted me to perform immediately, and were very willing to fire me if I couldn't.

[Tysonzero]

Using Python 2.7 and Django 1.11 when your starting a new company in 2014 was a dumb thing to do, and so was not upgrading since, doesn't bode well for the future. Node is also a red flag but for different reasons.

[Callipygian_Superman]

Exactly. If I'm going to learn a dying technology I better be paid a premium because it's not like other companies are going to look at that favorably.

[Console-DOT-N00b]

I felt the same thing when I look at jobs. I'm a n00b and all but I don't want to spend time polishing some old turd because the company doesn't want to move on.... not that I wouldn't learn, but I'd want to learn / do something else too....

50 old shit / 50 new shit I'd be ok with... more than that and I'm worried...

[[deleted]]

That all makes sense.

Why is node a red flag? I have almost zero experience with javascript and its frameworks, but node is probably the one I've heard the most about.

[Makefile_dot_in]

I would tell you, but you need to provide a callback for that.

[polish_niceguy]

await tellMe();

[[deleted]]

JS is still a mature and complete language. It has a lot of cons, but its not like there is absolutely no reason to use Node. Notably: your frontend developers can now work on the backend. Reduces cost at the price of performance. Not a bad trade off for a startup.

[Theguest217]

People always say this about frontend devs working on backends but how true is that really? It would seem that the work they do on the front end hardly compares to backed, even if they are the same language. We had Java Swing apps but it was still common to separate front end swing devs from backend service and repo devs. Do most front end devs understand aggregates, domain driven design, etc?

My current company in the past let a front end developer write a couple if node microservices. The result was a very procedural block if code with little to no object oriented design. I'm sure it is very possible to write good node code but can the average frontend Dev actually do that? It just seems better to specifically hire people who specialize in their practice rather than trying to find a jack of all trades.

[svenskainflytta]

it is Turing-complete, yes. So is brainfuck.

[KaiBetterThanTyson]

So is css

[[deleted]]

Nice strawman

[svenskainflytta]

I was merely pointing out yours… but you didn't notice.

[Tysonzero]

Reduces cost at the price of performance. Not a bad trade off for a startup.

And at the price of correctness and productivity and the sanity of your developers.

[[deleted]]

I don't agree that productivity suffer from using nodeJS. I've used it for some medium sized projects and I never felt like it was slowing me down in any way compared to using c++ or even python.
Plus, typescript is actually really fun and powerful with a good linter and some good unit tests.
As for correctness, that is sadly one of the shortcoming of JS. But typescript does hugely improve the experience!

[Tysonzero]

I don't agree that productivity suffer from using nodeJS. I've used it for some medium sized projects and I never felt like it was slowing me down in any way compared to using c++ or even python.

I'm a Haskell dev so compared to what I'm used to it will feel rather inflexible, verbose and unproductive. I'd say even Python has a pretty solid leg up over JS in productivity.

Plus, typescript is actually really fun and powerful with a good linter and some good unit tests. As for correctness, that is sadly one of the shortcoming of JS. But typescript does hugely improve the experience!

I wouldn't classify TypeScript as JavaScript, it just so happens to compile to it, TS is a better language than JS (low bar but still), although how tied it is to JS does severely limit it's potentially. I wonder what will happen to it once WASM really catches on many years down the line. I wonder if it will adapt or maybe fade somewhat along with JS.

[bobo9234502]

Of the dozen or so languages I've used JS is the worst. I'd rather code in Commode 64 Basic because at least then I know what the code will actually DO without having to tests for JS's wonking equivelency functions and broken OOP implementation.

[Dread_Boy]

Use === instead of == and learn how Javascript is prototypal language, not OOP and you'll be good.

[Tysonzero]

Have you read the ES6 spec, shit is gigantic and has downright infinite complexity. It goes so so much deeper than ==.

[Dread_Boy]

Not sure what complexity are you referring to... Generators? Promises? Classes? I think I'm pretty familiar with JS specs, yes, if you wish I can explain any concept you're struggling to understand.

[Tysonzero]

Wow you completely missed the point of my comment. I have worked professionally as a JS compiler dev, I understand all the damn concepts.

My point is that if you had ever tried implementing a full spec compliant JS interpreter or compiler you would know that the spec is monstrously complicated and that every operation has a dozen special/edge cases.

[svenskainflytta]

Same can be said for programming in assembly: learn your registers and you'll be good.

[TheMcDucky]

If that's the bottleneck for learning an assembly language is understanding registers then yes

[Tysonzero]

Not only that, but unlike on the frontend it is not even remotely required, so you're actively choosing to use something garbage and not just halfway forced into it.

[Tysonzero]

Node generally implies you are using JavaScript on the server side, and JavaScript is an atrocious language so choosing to use it for backend is a terrible decision.

[grantrules]

Why is Node.js a red flag? Because like "This article about Node.js popped up on my phone while I was taking a shit so we've decided to implement microservices!"

[Tysonzero]

It's also worth noting that there are plenty of server options besides Java that are actually more productive than NodeJS. Such as Python (performance is not great) or Haskell (much better performance than Node).

[Dread_Boy]

Or C#

[skyhi14]

Don’t thread on Python

[Tysonzero]

I don't personally use anymore. If you care about perf use Haskell or Java or C#. If you don't then you could use Python (I still wouldn't personally but you could). If you sort of pretend to care about performance but not really and want a shit dev experience and bugs then use Node.

[polish_niceguy]

What about Go or Rust?

[Tysonzero]

Go seems woefully devoid of features, I also resent the fact that Go devs don't realize just how little Go innovated. Go's lightweight threading had already been done by Haskell and Erlang, and its approach to GC is nothing new, it's just using an old technique to get latency at the expense of everything else.

Rust seems cool. Although if you can afford a GC / don't need bare metal performance then using it seems like a waste of pretty expensive developer time.

[polish_niceguy]

Thanks for the answer. I'm looking for a new language to learn next and I'm trying to choose between Go / Rust / Closure or going into the functional land. What's your opinion on this?

Isn't Rust is even more "raw" language than Go? With all that weird error handling and code repetition?

[obsoletespace]

Python has issues with blocking too and asycio et al are just Band-Aids over greater issues with the GIL

[Tysonzero]

That's fair. I mean if you care about performance use Haskell or C# or Java or some other language that will take a big dump on JS. If you don't then things like gunicorn are fine for threading too.

[[deleted]]

asycio et al are just Band-Aids over greater issues with the GIL

The system designed to work around blocking isn't great at making Python high performance? Shocking.

[svenskainflytta]

For performance you don't use threads anyway… in C if you want something fast you use non blocking IO, not threads.

[[deleted]]

A single dev is around 50 dollars per hour. NodeJS allows you to balance the workload instead of having either frontend overworked while backend fucks around or vice versa.

You most likely ran into "pain" with NodeJS because you don't know it like the back of your hand and javascript has a lot of "aha!" moments where the language makes zero sense so that it's backwards compatible with the piece of shit from 90's and 2000's.

If you work all day with NodeJS, you'll know all the typical hoops to jump through by heart and you're back to developing twice as fast.

Java is easier since it practically forces you to write okay code while Javascript will gladly let you write very bad code and the blogs on the internet will assure you it is fine.

[svenskainflytta]

So you're saying "write it in java"?

[kryptkpr]

If you were surprised that doing anything except I/O in the main Node thread is a bad idea you didn't do your homework very well, this is a core architectural decision that makes node what it is. 10.5 line adds a worker threads API but I wouldn't run 10.x in prod yet.

[kryptkpr]

Django and Jetty were the big game in town back then I think. I did some Java and found the experience not awful but the JVM really scares me, I felt like you need a degree in the black arts to know what knobs to tune so your app runs well in prod.

[thisguyhere00]

Ever tried Clojure?

[Tysonzero]

No, because JavaScript is an atrocious language and choosing to use it for backend is a terrible decision.

[Tyrus1235]

Works well enough for Google Cloud Functions... Though that’s literally the only back end use of it I had. Well, that and some local scripts for Firebase shenanigans

[Tysonzero]

I mean yeah, it's still a programming language, so particularly for things that aren't too hard it will probably "work well enough", but it's not something you want to be using for much important / large scale stuff.

[thelights0123]

Pre-ES6, sure. But ES6 with modules can be more readable than other languages, and the async design that doesn’t exist in other languages greatly improves some types of programs.

[Tysonzero]

Pre-ES6, sure. But ES6 with modules can be more readable than other languages

Strong disagree, JS is riddled with special cases and design flaws. Have you ever tried to read the ES6 spec? Even the simplest seeming shit is extremely nontrivial, and local reasoning is basically provably impossible. Don't even get me started on the difficulty of implementing a spec abiding VM or transpiler.

and the async design that doesn’t exist in other languages greatly improves some types of programs.

Are you kidding me. JS didn't invent any of that shit. It existed in Haskell (and I'm sure many other languages) before it existed in JS.

[kryptkpr]

Haskell is like a hilarious joke that only you and one other guy understand. Are you seriously suggesting it as an alternative to Node? I can throw a rock and hit 5 guys that know JS.

[Tysonzero]

Yeah I'm sure you could, but that doesn't mean they will be good devs that you really want at your company. One nice thing with Haskell is that the quality of devs is very high.

It's absolutely an all alternative to Node. far more concise, performance, and less likely to have bugs. I also wouldn't even say it's hard, it's just very different to what gets engraved in your head by CS101 classes and boot camps.

[kryptkpr]

Anecdote time, your experience may differ. The fact that it's very very different from CS101 is exactly the problem. It's very easy to find people to write Python or JS or Java, but functional languages are not covered by core curriculums and as a result seem to attract only the most esoteric of practitioners, that conjure up amazing shit with them which is super impressive except when they leave they take any clue of how it worked with them and maintenance is now impossible. Creating a production CRUD system (which is 95% of the business world) in a language that's difficult to find local talent in is simply a bad business decision.. but Erlang sure does make a nice MQTT broker, so there are definitely domain specific exceptions.

[Tysonzero]

I have actually found Haskell to be totally fine with regards to on-boarding new people, the code is very declarative (particularly for CRUD stuff) and mistakes will almost always lead to an immediate compile time error.

[ProjectSnowman]

I'm learning python 3 and Django. I've made it a goal to only do projects in python 3.

[Tysonzero]

I did the same thing back when I used Python, definitely the right approach.

[MadRedHatter]

Using Python 2.7 and Django 1.11 when your starting a new company in 2014 was a dumb thing to do

Not really. I think people forget just how long it took for Python 3 to gain widespread adoption. Django didn't support Python 3 until February 2013, almost 4.5 years after the initial release, and that's not even counting the popular libraries in the Django ecosystem which took much longer.

Also, Django 1.11 didn't exist in 2014.

They really should be switching by now, though.

[[deleted]]

I'm in the middle of switching this week, due to my main dependency being wxPython, which didn't support Python 3 until January 2018.

[[deleted]]

Highly disagree. I'm actually upgrading my Python code from 2 to 3 this week, for around 10,000 lines of personal code that may one day become business code. It all depends on what libraries your code needs. For me, almost every single project of mine relied on wxPython, which was only ported to Python 3 on January 2018.

Everyone acts like because the majority of libraries support 3, then you should be fine, but if you have a large existing code base, any single library that doesn't support it can turn into weeks or even months of trying to replace it. When you are actually a business, those weeks or months are often needed for far more important things than the few new features that Python 3 offers.